The sport of paintball was developed back in the early 1980's. Paintball gun technology has developed rapidly since then, out-pacing all other paintball-related equipment. The evolution of paintball guns started with single shot pistols. Then the pump paintball gun was developed which still had to be manually re-cocked to load another paintball and set the hammer in the “ready-to-fire” position. Pump paintball guns were the standard paintball bun for a few years. Then Tippmann Pneumatics (U.S. Pat. No. 4,819,609) developed one of the first semi-automatic paintball guns. This design used air to push a spring-fired hammer back to the ready position after the gun was fired. This design is known as an open bolt blow back paintball gun because the hammer is blown back into the ready position and, since the bolt is connected to the hammer, the bolt is open allowing a ball to drop into the breech.
Just a short time after Tippmann developed the block back paintball gun, Glenn Palmer developed a closed bolt pneumatic paintball gun built using a pump paintball gun. This paintball gun used a pneumatic piston attached to a manually operated 4-way valve. After the paintball gun was fired, the trigger traveled an extra distance which activated the 4-way valve, shuttling air to the back side of the pneumatic piston. The piston then pushed the bolt and hammer back allowing another paintball to fall into the breech. Then the trigger was released and the 4-way valve shuttled air back to the front side of the piston, pulling the bolt closed and sealing the paintball into the breech, leaving the paintball gun ready to fire again.
It was found that a paintball fired from a closed bolt pneumatic paintball gun had a longer range and better accuracy than a paintball fired from an open bolt blow back paintball gun. The only problem with a closed bolt paintball gun was its complexity, which required a higher price tag.
Recently, electronics have been added to the closed bolt pneumatic guns in an attempt to simplify their mechanical complexity. Instead, electronics have complicated the situation further because many of the paintball guns upon which the electronic guns are based had poor designs that are not suitable for electronic automation. Current electronic paintball guns come in several different designs. Four out of five of them are open bolt designs, but they all are inadequate for the job, usually being overly complicated with many small and delicate parts with poor construction.
The electronic guns use electric solenoid valves which are pressure sensitive and easily damaged from the high air pressures often used in prior art paintball guns. Also the use of the unregulated air to move the bolt back and forth creates a problem when the ball gets caught by the bolt. The bolt can cut the ball in half causing the gun to stop working. Some electronic guns have hoses and delicate parts on the outside of the gun that can be hit and damaged by a paintball. But for the most part the prior art electronic guns use high end electronics and low end guns to try to make a high grade paintball gun.
The present invention corrects this problem with a design specifically developed from the ground up to be an electronic closed bolt pneumatic paintball gun and more particularly to be an improved electronic pneumatic paintball gun with an improved pneumatic hammer, electronic control circuit, pneumatics pressure regulator, bolt design and cocking system. All parts of the gun are built around a cartridge design for quick replacement of a malfunctioning part. This design combines electronics, reliable design functions, ease of maintenance, and simple construction.